The American public is being prepared.
If the attack on Iran does come, there will be no warning, no declaration
of war, no truth, writes John Pilger

The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could
not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a "civil
war" and "sectarian violence" were repeated incessantly.
It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens
of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis
were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to
blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint
that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.

And when you left the lift, this followed you to your
room, to the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next country.
Such is the power of America's corporate propaganda, which, as Edward Said
pointed out in Culture and Imperialism, "penetrates electronically"
with its equivalent of a party line.

The party line changed the other day. For almost three
years it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force behind the "insurgency",
led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was clearly being
groomed for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein enjoys. It mattered not that
al-Zarqawi had never been seen alive and that only a fraction of the "insurgents"
followed al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's role was to distract attention
from the thing that almost all Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American
occupation of their country.

Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian
violence" and "civil war", the big news is the attacks by
Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported
in the CNN "mainstream", is that the Salvador Option has been
invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and
trained by the US, which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the
incitement of a real civil war and the break-up of Iraq, the original war
aim of Bush's administration. The ministry of the interior in Baghdad, which
is run by the CIA, directs the principal death squads. Their members are
not exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal are the Sunni-led
Special Police Commandos, headed by former senior officers in Saddam's Ba'ath
Party. This unit was formed and trained by CIA "counter-insurgency"
experts, including veterans of the CIA's terror operations in central America
in the 1980s, notably El Salvador. In his new book, Empire's Workshop (Metropolitan
Books), the American historian Greg Grandin describes the Salvador Option
thus: "Once in office, [President] Reagan came down hard on central
America, in effect letting his administration's most committed militarists
set and execute policy. In El Salvador, they provided more than a million
dollars a day to fund a lethal counter-insurgency campaign . . . All told,
US allies in central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000
people, tortured hundreds of thousands and drove millions into exile."

Although the Reagan administration spawned the current
Bushites, or "neo-cons", the pattern was set earlier. In Vietnam,
death squads trained, armed and directed by the CIA murdered up to 50,000
people in Operation Phoenix. In the mid-1960s in Indonesia CIA officers
compiled "death lists" for General Suharto's killing spree during
his seizure of power. After the 2003 invasion, it was only a matter of time
before this venerable "policy" was applied in Iraq.

According to the investigative writer Max Fuller (National
Review Online), the key CIA manager of the interior ministry death squads
"cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military
mission in El Salvador". Professor Grandin names another central America
veteran whose job now is to "train a ruthless counter-insurgent force
made up of ex-Ba'athist thugs". Another, says Fuller, is well-known
for his "production of death lists". A secret militia run by the
Americans is the Facilities Protection Service, which has been responsible
for bombings. "The British and US Special Forces," concludes Fuller,
"in conjunction with the [US-created] intelligence services at the
Iraqi defence ministry, are fabricating insurgent bombings of Shias."

On 16 March, Reuters reported the arrest of an American
"security contractor" who was found with weapons and explosives
in his car. Last year, two Britons disguised as Arabs were caught with a
car full of weapons and explosives; British forces bulldozed the Basra prison
to rescue them. The Boston Globe recently reported: "The FBI's counter-terrorism
unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering
that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including
attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen

in the United States, according to senior government
officials."

As I say, all this has been tried before - just as
the preparation of the American public for an atrocious attack on Iran is
similar to the WMD fabrications in Iraq. If that attack comes, there will
be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth. Imprisoned in the Hilton
lift, staring at CNN, my fellow passengers could be excused for not making
sense of the Middle East, or Latin America, or anywhere. They are isolated.
Nothing is explained. Congress is silent. The Democrats are moribund. And
the freest media on earth insult the public every day. As Voltaire put it:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."